by Mustafa Ali
Let’s not pretend America isn’t fluent in silence. We’ve perfected the art. Generations of whispers have been buried beneath courthouse stairs, inside Black churches burned for daring to breathe, in the hush that follows every time the powerful are caught with blood on their hands and the courts say, “There’s nothing to see here.”
But Ida B. Wells never honored silence. She dragged truth through the front door and nailed it to the front page. She named names. She published evidence. And if she were alive today — watching the shadowy evasions surrounding Donald Trump and the Epstein files — she would not be polite. She’d grab the rotting roots of this hypocrisy and hold them to the light.
She’d start, no doubt, with a question that still slices deep: Whose lives matter enough to seek justice?
Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were not rumor. They were not internet conspiracy. They were documented patterns — flights, photos, testimonies, names. Girls, many of them underage, many of them vulnerable, trafficked through a network that dressed itself in wealth and power. And now, as the files gather dust, and accountability is dissolved in distraction, the question lingers like stench: Why haven’t we seen the full truth?
Let’s be clear — when Ida documented the lynchings of Black men across the South, she knew what kind of America she was confronting. She wrote, with fire in her typewriter, that these were not acts of spontaneous violence, but orchestrated spectacles — rituals of control. The mob didn’t just want blood. They wanted silence from everyone who dared to demand due process or ask questions. And that’s what’s happening again.
Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were not rumor. They were not internet conspiracy.
Because Trump’s America isn’t just about politics — it’s about power that performs above the law. It’s about a nation where truth is selectively prosecuted, and memory is manipulated like currency. And now we have Epstein — a man whose crimes implicated princes, presidents, billionaires. We have a dead man in a cell, a so-called suicide that reads more like a script. We have a client list that should’ve shaken Washington to its knees. But instead, we get sealed documents, broken chain-of-custody, and a public too exhausted to scream.
Wells would scream.
She would not be seduced by partisan spectacle. She wouldn’t care if the abuser wore red or blue, if they donated to Democrats or dined with Republicans. She would follow the facts. And she’d remind us, again and again, that justice delayed is justice denied.
So what would she do with the Epstein files?
What makes this moment all the more grotesque is how familiar it feels. For centuries, America has built monuments to men while burying the victims. Ida knew this. That’s why she kept records. That’s why she printed the names of sheriffs and mayors, why she risked her life to publish testimonies no one wanted to hear.
She’d publish them. Every name. Every page. Every alias. Every co-conspirator.
She’d call him what he is: a man who’s spent a lifetime dodging accountability, whether in real estate, elections, insurrections — or, now, the quiet implication that his name may be nestled among the worst of the worst. A man who brags of sexual assault on tape and still walks freely through halls of power. Donald is a man who’s more symptom than anomaly—a reflection of a country that still measures justice on a scale tilted by money, race, and fear.
This isn’t just about Trump, of course. It’s about every institution that looked the other way. Every prosecutor who declined to push. Every network that buried the story. Every citizen who decided not to ask, “Why are the victims always expected to forget before the perpetrators are ever named?”
Ida would not forget.
There is no justice without truth.
She would remind us that injustice is not just a crime against the victims — it is a public wound. And the longer we pretend not to see it, the deeper it festers.
She would also remind us that the silence around Epstein is not just about protecting powerful men. It is about what we teach our daughters. It is about what we demand from our press. It is about what kind of country we are willing to be.
Because in the end, the question isn’t just what happened? It’s why don’t we care enough to find out?
There is no justice without truth. No healing without reckoning.
If Ms. Ida B. Wells were here today, she’d be typing in all caps:
UNSEAL THE FILES.
NAME THE NAMES.
TELL THE DAMN TRUTH.
Because until we do, every flag we wave is just camouflage, and every courtroom oath is just theater.
And the silence?
That silence becomes complicity.
